Ashenden on Passport

[Bala Verde]

Epstein-Barr virus evidence of doping?

First of all, I described a proccess, not the content.

Let me reply with a counter question: "only fingerprints or only DNA are found on the crime scene. Did the person it belongs to commit the crime?"

I tried to suggest that the narrative and the context lead to convictions.

Mono will ultimately be one element amongst many others that can tip the balance one way or another. If it's mono alone, I don't think you would have much ground for a conviction...

 

[Cobblestones]

Longitudinal testing might well be a good way to define absolute upper and lower limits for the blood values of a given rider. For most riders, I don't believe it's a feasible way to determine what their natural short term variation in blood values is, because testing is too infrequent. So, surely an understanding of natural variations over a week or so, has to come from the passport data as a whole.

Just speculating here. If you know that acceptable variations over a range of time frames are calculated individually for each rider, feel free to enlighten me.

The point is, weekly variations shouldn't really be that big. The body doesn't react all that fast and variations are gradual. We also know the general reaction to prolonged effort (such as a GT) or altitude training (or hypobaric tents). We also know how the body reacts in general to EPO-type products and blood transfusions. The details have been pretty well documented and discussed on this forum. So if there are variations, they should be explainable one way or the other.

Variations are calculated individually for each rider. However, there's nothing in the rule books which allows exclusion of riders or doping convictions based on individual (suspicious) variations. The only hard limits we have are the crit and off score which are both applied non-specifically (meaning the same limit for all riders). And those are not variations, they are hard limits.